The state's highest court denied an appeal by Alex Jones to overturn the $1.4 billion in defamation damages that a judge and jury in Waterbury awarded Sandy Hook families after a headline-grabbing three-week trial in 2022.
The "M3GAN" screening will also allow fans to communicate with the evil doll herself via a M3GAN chatbot. read more
The last ten days have thrown into doubt the role of the United States at the core of the global economic and financial system.
The big picture: After generations in which the U.S. dollar and its government securities have been the world's bedrock safe haven assets, global investors woke up this week to the possibility that they are not particularly safe, and not at all a haven.
Military chiefs at Nato have been warned of global internet blackouts following a string of suspected Russian attacks on subsea cables. Telecoms companies including Vodafone, O2 owner Telefonica and Orange have written to UK, EU and Nato officials warning that a rise in sabotage incidents was putting critical services at risk.
The GOP's Senate campaign arm delivered a blunt warning to Republicans on Thursday: Democrats are about to swamp you in cash. read more
@#16 ... People argue that auto racing is an athletic sport, even though the "athletes" are just driving around in circles for the afternoon.
Yeah, right.
Then, I popped that into a search engine, and came upo with this ..
Ask the expert: Are race car drivers athletes?
msutoday.msu.edu
Wow, just WTF friggin' wow.
@#5 ... About half of Americans are complete idiots. Guess which half. ...
My view is that there seems to be a 25% base for Pres Trump.
The 25% or so required to raise that to the ~about half~ level are Independents.
Political Independents: Who They Are, What They Think (2019)
www.pewresearch.org
... Independents often are portrayed as political free agents with the potential to alleviate the nation's rigid partisan divisions. Yet the reality is that most independents are not all that "independent" politically. And the small share of Americans who are truly independent " less than 10% of the public has no partisan leaning " stand out for their low level of interest in politics.
Among the public overall, 38% describe themselves as independents, while 31% are Democrats and 26% call themselves Republicans, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2018. These shares have changed only modestly in recent years, but the proportion of independents is higher than it was from 2000-2008, when no more than about a third of the public identified as independents. (For more on partisan identification over time, see the 2018 report "Wide Gender Gap, Growing Educational Divide in Voters' Party Identification.") ...
@#23 ... they have had not GDP per capita growth ...
How does your current alias extrapolate GDP per capita growth to stability of the underlying monetary unit?
Asked differently, how do Pres Trump's recent declarations, and subsequent retreats, further the stabilization of the US Dollar?
Or are those actions working to destabilize the Dollar?
Then there's this ...
Trump Wants a Weaker Dollar. Getting One Isn't So Easy. (2019)
www.nytimes.com
... President Trump has made no secret of his frustration that the United States dollar has strengthened against other currencies. ...
But, I have to ask, in his attempt to weaken the Dollar, is Pres Trump destroying the Dollar as the world's currency?
@#25 ... that's weird. ...
What is weird for me is the apparent focus of Pres Trump and Republicans upon the prices of eggs.
Trump promised to bring down egg prices on day one. Now, he's sharing articles telling people to shut up' about it (March 2025)
www.yahoo.com
There was a bird flu crisis.
Nearly 200 million hens were culled due to that crisis.
So, not only are there fewer hens laying eggs for consumers, there are also fewer hens laying eggs to grow into hens to lay eggs for consumers.
So, it is not weird to me.
Why is it weird to your current alias?
... Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador ...
Terrorism Confinement Center
en.wikipedia.org
... The Terrorism Confinement Center,[a] abbreviated CECOT, is a maximum security prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador. The prison was built in late 2022 amid a large-scale gang crackdown in the country. The Salvadoran government opened the prison in January 2023, and it began housing inmates the following month.
As of 11 June 2024, CECOT had a population of 14,532 inmates. With a capacity for 40,000 inmates, CECOT is the largest prison in Latin America and one of the largest in the world by prisoner capacity. In March 2025, the Salvadoran government incarcerated over 200 deportees that the second Donald Trump administration alleged were Venezuelan gang members. ...
Critics of CECOT have referred to it as a "black hole of human rights".[20] The BBC has indicated that CECOT does not adhere to the Red Cross' international standard that recommends that each prisoner receives at least 3.4 square meters (37 sq ft) of space in a cell; CECOT on average gives prisoners 0.6 square meters (6.5 sq ft) of space.[19] Martin Horn, a former administrator of the Rikers Island prison in the United States, stated that 40,000 prisoners is "too many to manage in one place [...] under any circumstances", referring to the prison's listed capacity.[17] There are not enough bunks for every prisoner assigned to each cell;[24] when the BBC asked Garca what the maximum capacity of each cell was, he replied that "where you can fit 10 people, you can fit 20".[20] ...
The BBC has also indicated that prisoners are deprived of rights such as outside recreation and family visitation outlined by international guidelines.[19] Juan Carlos Snchez, a program officer of the Due Process of Law Foundation, raised concerns about the quality of food served at CECOT. He also questioned the status of due process as the prison incarcerated both convicted criminals and individuals on trial for their alleged crimes. He warns that prisoners could become "sick physically, mentally" and "come out with rage".[22] Antonio Durn, a senior judge in Zacatecoluca, said that the conditions in CECOT amount to "torture".[19] Zaira Navas, a legal advisor at the Cristosal NGO, states that it is difficult to monitor conditions inside CECOT and that conditions "might become inhumane and degrading because no-one has access to that prison".[19] Doug Specht, a human rights scholar at the University of Westminster, wrote in The SAIS Review of International Affairs that conditions in CECOT "fall significantly short of accepted norms for the humane treatment of prisoners".[70]
Amnesty International raised concerns that CECOT "could threaten human rights" ("podra amenazar DD.HH") and that the prison represented "politics of mass incarceration" ("poltica de encarcelamiento masivo").[71] ...
So, a place that Pres Trump would want to enable with US money?
@#15 ... What would the replacement be for the reserve currency? The Euro? ...
The depends upon how far Pres Trump drags down the US dollar.
OpEd: Trump's Tariffs Were Supposed to Boost the Dollar. Why the Opposite Happened.
www.wsj.com
... While President Trump has always claimed to want a weaker dollar, the consensus among investors was that his policies would strengthen it. Turns out he was right, but perhaps in the worst way.
On Thursday, stocks tumbled in the U.S., Europe and Asia following Trump's unveiling of a raft of punishing "Liberation Day" tariffs. What was more unexpected is that the U.S. dollar tumbled against most major currencies. The WSJ Dollar Index, an indicator based on a basket of currencies, has now lost more than 5.9% this year and is below where it was on Nov. 5, before its postelection rally.
This is making Wall Street analysts look pretty bad: Most were telling investors, even up to the very moment in which tariffs were announced Wednesday, that protectionist policies would push up the currency. The idea was that fewer purchases of overseas goods would narrow the trade deficit and mechanically reduce U.S. demand for foreign exchange.
Also, U.S. growth is outpacing the eurozone's, which has historically been dollar-positive.
Instead, speculators have swung to betting heavily against the greenback ...
An interesting viewpoint...
OpEd: We're watching Trump's 7th bankruptcy unfold (2020)
finance.yahoo.com
... As a businessman, Donald Trump ran 6 businesses that declared bankruptcy because they couldn't pay their bills.
As the president running for a second term, Trump is repeating some of the mistakes he made as a businessman and risking the downfall of yet another venture: his own political operation.
In the 1980s, Trump was a swashbuckling real-estate investor who bet big on the rise of Atlantic City after New Jersey legalized gambling there. He acquired three casinos that by 1991 couldn't pay their debts. The Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy in 1991, the Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle in 1992. Lenders restructured the debt rather than liquidate and Trump put his casino holdings into a new company that went bankrupt in 2004. The company that emerged from that restructuring declared bankruptcy in 2009. Trump's 6th bankruptcy was the Plaza Hotel, which he bought in 1988. It went bankrupt by 1992. ...
Apologies for the duplkicate post.
The site said, on my initial post, that there was a problem. So I tried again.
Hence the duplicate post.
Oops.